Keeping Your Electronic Devices Safe During Lightning Storms

The violent weather that has beset the U.S South and Midwest for the past several weeks has left swaths of mind-numbing destruction, and my heart goes out to those catastrophically affected, and especially those who have lost loved ones. This sort of natural (or how natural is it?) disaster brings into perspective the relative triviality of most of one’s own problems.

I’m thankful that tornados are essentially unheard of in Nova Scotia, Canada where I live, although a weather event that Environment Canada investigators called a “cold microburst” blew through here one summer afternoon about 15 years ago, flattening trees, tearing decks off houses, and sinking some boats moored in the lake, all in the span of a minute or two. I was watching from my living room window, and even though were were missed by the main force of the phenomenon, the air turned milky-white and the window got plastered with leaf fragments. Amazingly, our property sustained no damage.

We also get frequent lightning storms in the warmer months, although they can happen here year-round. There will typically be several lightning-caused power outages annually, and last summer a close lightning strike took out the modem power supply for my wireless broadband antenna, although the modem itself and my wireless router survived unscathed.

In an artlcle entitled “Tips to Keep Your Gear Safe During Electrical Storms,” Lifehacker’s Alan Henry provides some advice on lightning-defense strategies, such as installing surge protectors, even better unplugging electronic and electric devices during thunderstorms, and keeping backups off-site, although of course no amount of preparation can save your electronics from something as powerful as a tornado or a thunderstorm so massive that your house comes down.

Personally, I have surge protectors on all my electronics, but don’t really trust them, and my routine is to go around the house unplugging stuff as soon as an electrical storm rolls in. Tedious, but worthwhile I think.

One of the big advantages of using laptops and other portable devices for computing is that one is not obliged to stop for the duration of electrical storms, and the potential for data loss due to sudden power failure is eliminated.

Of course, and Alan Henry notes, no amount of preparation can save your electronics from something as powerful as a tornado or a thunderstorm so massive that your house comes down.